China will for the first time implement a targeted nationwide HIV/AIDS prevention policy to combat the rising incidence of the infection among men who have sex with men, said China Daily which reported on the announcement of the Ministry of Health's 2008 national health initiatives.

It has come a long way since the days of denying a growing HIV/AIDS problem in the country, and suppressing news coverage and public discussion. Since late 2003, China has mounted an aggressive nationwide campaign against AIDS and introduced pilot programs that provide free condoms, free methadone and even free antiretroviral drugs.

Although the ministry did not release any details of the campaign, it said it will target gay men alongside other groups such as farmers and workers, youths and university students in its intervention campaigns.

"By learning more about gay people, we can better protect them against this incurable disease," Wang Weizhen, deputy director of the HIV/AIDS prevention department under the ministry's disease control bureau, was quoted as saying in China Daily.

"Studies are under way in several cities to collect information on gay men, such as their distribution and behavioural patterns," Wang said.

Wu Zunyou, director of the National Center for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention, estimated in the report that that China has between five million and 10 million gay men "who are in the highest risk group of contracting HIV and AIDS."

The warned that the number of new infections among this group is rising drastically.

In 2005, homosexual sex accounted for just 0.4 percent of all new infections reported. Last year, the figure had risen to 3.3 percent, he said.

Xinhua News reported that figures from recent research on MSM shows HIV/AIDS prevalence rates of between 2.5 percent to 6.5 percent. Furthermore, more than 50 percent of MSM have several sexual partners while only 10 percent to 20 percent use condoms.

According to figures from the Ministry of Health, of the 700,000 Chinese living with HIV/AIDS, 11 percent of them contracted the virus through gay sex and about 41 percent via heterosexual sex. Since the 1980s and 1990s, hundreds of thousands are believed to have become infected with HIV after selling their blood at unsafe plasma stations in Henan province.

Homosexuality - then classified under "hooliganism" - was stuck off China's criminal code in 1997 and removed from the Chinese Psychiatric Association's list of mental illnesses in 2001.